Congratulations on reaching the final step in our guide to successfully making the move to the cloud. After lots of hard work, you’re almost there. However, you still have one thing left to accomplish: reviewing your current disaster plan.
Previous Cloud Migration Steps
Before we dive into the final part of this series, feel free to take a minute to review the steps that got us to this point.
Step 1: Know Your Current Needs and Goals
Step 2: Determine Your Future Needs and Goals
Step 3: Consider Your Current Obligations
Step 4: Determine the Impact of Inaccessible Systems
Step 5: Review Your Bandwidth Performance
Step 6: Review Line of Business Application Performance
Step 7: Review Your Disaster Plan
If disaster strikes, can your business bounce back quickly? Downtime can come at a high cost: An unplanned data center outage costs an average of $8,851 per minute, according to the 2016 Cost of Data Center Outages report from the Ponemon Institute and Emerson Network Power.
Need a little bit more help? All businesses need to identify their recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). This will make it easier for you to understand how significantly data loss would impact your business. We encourage you break this down on a per department level, which helps you identify a comprehensive and overarching perspective.
- The RPO is the maximum amount of data loss acceptable for your business
- The RTO is the amount of time your company can run without access to its data.
When you move to the cloud, you’ll want to ensure your disaster plan is solid, so here are a few key questions to ask to assess your preparedness.
- Do you have a backup? If so, what type? Is it a file backup / restore solution, backup and disaster recovery or a business continuity option?
- Where are your backups currently located? Are they onsite or offsite?
- Do you have multiple Internet connections? If so, have you tested them?
- Are your systems accessible from the outside or not?
- Are your systems located in one centralized spot?
- Do you use cloud or hosted email? What does the cloud or hosted provider allow for restorations in their standard plan (nightly? weekly?) What if you have an outage midday or someone deletes your data?
- During a disaster, do you have a plan for what your employees should do? Have they completed training so they’re aware of the procedure? Can your applications still run or do you simply have access to file data?
- How much does a 1 hour outage cost your business?
Once you have answered all of these questions and made sure you have a comprehensive disaster plan in place, you’ve laid the foundation for a successful migration to the cloud. If you have any questions about backup and disaster recovery and/or business continuity, then our expert team at Stratosphere Networks can help. Feel free to contact us by calling 877-599-3999 or emailing sales@stratospherenetworks.com.
You’ve made it through our guide to preparing your business for the move to the cloud. However, there are still some crucial next steps you’ll want to take. Watch for the final installment in this series to learn about them.
